Influential Women in Philosophy From the Last 10 Years
Our list of women in philosophy features famous philosophers who have been highly cited and searched online over the last 10 years. This inspirational list includes academics and professionals interested in ethics, feminist theory, critical race theory, and even animal philosophy.
Top 10 Women in Philosophy From the Last 10 Years
According to the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, philosophy is a reasoned pursuit of fundamental truths, a quest for understanding, a study of principles of conduct… Philosophy develops the capacity to see the world from the perspective of other individuals and other cultures.
Women philosophers are raising new questions and offering new perspectives in ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy of mind, and feminist philosophy. The field of feminist philosophy is aimed at understanding and challenging the oppression of women…Feminist philosophers question the structures and institutions that regulate our lives.
Contributions by current scholars include feminist critiques of liberalism (Nussbaum), the intersection of information technology and feminist theory (Haraway), philosophy of religion (Anderson), virtue ethics (Nussbaum, Foot), and the use and misuse of language in relation to women (Irigaray).
App. 23.68% of philosophy professors are women.
Pioneering Women Philosophers in History
- Hannah Arendt published three important works (The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, and On Revolution) in the 1950′s that still influence political philosophers today, providing insights
about the modern predisposition to totalitarianism and threats to human freedom posed by both scientific abstraction and bourgeois morality.
- Joyce Mitchell Cook first Black woman to graduate from a professional philosophy program in the United States (Bryn Mawr College, 1955), she was also the first to receive a PhD in philosophy (Yale University, 1965). She later taught at Howard University, served as editor of a prominent philosophy journal, and became a White House presidential speechwriter for Jimmy Carter.
- Philippa Foot was one of the founders of contemporary virtue ethics and is credited with inventing the thought experiment known as the trolley problem.
- Ruth Barcan Marcus , a logician, developed the first formal systems of quantified modal logic. She is considered one of the most important academic philosophers/logicians of the 20th century.
Key Associations for Women Philosophers
- The International Association of Women Philosophers: The International Association of Women Philosophers is “a professional association and network that provides a forum for discussion, interaction and cooperation among women engaged in teaching and research in all aspects of philosophy, with a particular emphasis on feminist philosophy.”
- The Society for Women in Philosophy: SWIP was started in 1972 to support and promote women in philosophy.
- APA Committee on the Status of Women: This committee assesses and reports on the status of women in the profession.
- Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy: SPEP Committee on the Status for Women of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy was established in 1984 to increase the participation of women in SPEP.
- Women in Philosophy Task Force: WPHTF is “an umbrella group that works to coordinate initiatives and intensify efforts to advance women in philosophy.”
Influential Women in Philosophy From the Last 10 Years
- #1
Nancy Fraser
1947 - Present (77 years) - #2
Martha Nussbaum
1947 - Present (77 years) - #3
Carol Gilligan
1936 - Present (88 years)Carol Gilligan is an American feminist, ethicist, and psychologist, best known for her work on ethical community and ethical relationships. Gilligan is a professor of Humanities and Applied Psychology at New York University and was a visiting professor at the Centre for Gender Studies and Jesus College at the University of Cambridge until 2009. She is known for her book In a Different Voice , which criticized Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of moral development. - #4
Donna Haraway
1944 - Present (80 years)Donna J. Haraway is an American professor emerita in the history of consciousness and feminist studies departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a prominent scholar in the field of science and technology studies. She has also contributed to the intersection of information technology and feminist theory, and is a leading scholar in contemporary ecofeminism. Her work criticizes anthropocentrism, emphasizes the self-organizing powers of nonhuman processes, and explores dissonant relations between those processes and cultural practices, rethinking sources of ethics. - #5
Sally Haslanger
1955 - Present (69 years) - #6
Pamela Sue Anderson
1955 - 2017 (62 years)Pamela Sue Anderson was an American philosopher who specialized in philosophy of religion, feminist philosophy and continental philosophy. In 2007 she was an Official Fellow, Tutor in Philosophy and Christian Ethics, Dean, and Women’s Advisor of Regent’s Park College in the University of Oxford. Her former students include feminist philosopher Hanneke Canters. - #7
Kate Manne
1983 - Present (41 years)Kate Alice Manne is an Australian philosopher, associate professor of philosophy at Cornell University, and author. Her work is primarily in feminist philosophy, moral philosophy, and social philosophy. - #8
Julia Kristeva
1941 - Present (83 years)Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, semiotician, psychoanalyst, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. She has taught at Columbia University, and is now a professor emerita at Université Paris Cité. The author of more than 30 books, including Powers of Horror, Tales of Love, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, Proust and the Sense of Time, and the trilogy Female Genius, she has been awarded Commander of the Legion of Honor, Commander of the Order of Merit, the Holberg International Memorial Prize, the Hannah Arend... - #9
Nel Noddings
1929 - 2022 (93 years)Nel Noddings was an American feminist, educator, and philosopher best known for her work in philosophy of education, educational theory, and ethics of care. Biography Noddings received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and physical science from Montclair State University in New Jersey, a master’s degree in mathematics from Rutgers University, and a PhD in education from the Stanford University Graduate School of Education. - #10
Elisa Aaltola
1976 - Present (48 years)Elisa Aaltola is a Finnish philosopher, specialised in animal philosophy, moral psychology and environmental philosophy. Biography She was a visiting PhD student at the Institute for Ethics, Environment, and Public Policy at Lancaster University and submitted her doctoral thesis to the University of Turku on Animal Individuality: Moral and Cultural Categorisations. - #11
Luce Irigaray
1930 - Present (94 years)Luce Irigaray is a Belgian-born French feminist, philosopher, linguist, psycholinguist, psychoanalyst, and cultural theorist who examined the uses and misuses of language in relation to women. Irigaray’s first and most well known book, published in 1974, was Speculum of the Other Woman , which analyzes the texts of Freud, Hegel, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant through the lens of phallocentrism. Irigaray is the author of works analyzing many thinkers, including This Sex Which Is Not One , which discusses Lacan’s work as well as political economy; Elemental Passions can be read as a res... - #12
Susan Neiman
1955 - Present (69 years)Susan Neiman is an American moral philosopher, cultural commentator, and essayist. She has written extensively on the juncture between Enlightenment moral philosophy, metaphysics, and politics, both for scholarly audiences and the general public. She currently lives in Germany, where she is the Director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam. - #13
Judith Jarvis Thomson
1929 - 2020 (91 years)Judith Jarvis Thomson was an American philosopher who studied and worked on ethics and metaphysics. Her work ranges across a variety of fields, but she is most known for her work regarding the thought experiment titled the trolley problem and her writings on abortion. She is credited with naming, developing, and initiating the extensive literature on the trolley problem first posed by Philippa Foot which has found a wide range use since. Thomson also published a paper titled “A Defense of Abortion”, which makes the argument that the procedure is morally permissible even if it is assumed that ... - #14
Katerina Kolozova
1969 - Present (55 years)Katerina “Katarina” Kolozova Biography She is a director of and professor of gender studies and philosophy at the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, Skopje and a professor of the University American College Skopje, both in Skopje, North Macedonia. She has been associated with speculative realism and has written about the non-philosophy of François Laruelle and the works of Karl Marx. She has been a member of the Organisation Non-Philosophique Internationale , with headquarters in Paris, France, since it was founded. She is a board member of The New Centre for Research & Practice of ... - #15
Linda Martín Alcoff
1955 - Present (69 years) - #16
Catherine Malabou
1959 - Present (65 years)Catherine Malabou is a French philosopher. She is a Professor at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, at the European Graduate School, and in the department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, a position formerly held by Jacques Derrida. - #17
Sara Danius
1962 - 2019 (57 years)Sara Maria Danius was a Swedish literary critic and philosopher, and a scholar of literature and aesthetics. Danius was professor of aesthetics at Södertörn University, docent of literature at Uppsala University and professor in literary science at Stockholm University. - #18
Sandra Harding
1935 - Present (89 years)Sandra G. Harding is an American philosopher of feminist and postcolonial theory, epistemology, research methodology, and philosophy of science. She directed the UCLA Center for the Study of Women from 1996 to 2000, and co-edited Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society from 2000 to 2005. She is currently a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Education and Gender Studies at UCLA and a Distinguished Affiliate Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University. In 2013 she was awarded the John Desmond Bernal Prize by the Society for the Social Studies of Science . - #19
Susan Haack
1945 - Present (79 years)Susan Haack is a distinguished professor in the humanities, Cooper Senior Scholar in Arts and Sciences, professor of philosophy, and professor of law at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. - #20
Avital Ronell
1952 - Present (72 years)Avital Ronell is an American academic who writes about continental philosophy, literary studies, psychoanalysis, political philosophy, and ethics. She is a professor in the humanities and in the departments of Germanic languages and literature and comparative literature at New York University, where she co-directs the trauma and violence transdisciplinary studies program. As Jacques Derrida Professor of Philosophy, Ronell also teaches at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee. - #21
Christine Korsgaard
1952 - Present (72 years)Christine Marion Korsgaard, is an American philosopher who is the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy Emerita at Harvard University. Her main scholarly interests are in moral philosophy and its history; the relation of issues in moral philosophy to issues in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and the theory of personal identity; the theory of personal relationships; and in normativity in general. - #22
Mary Midgley
1919 - 2018 (99 years)Mary Beatrice Midgley was a British philosopher. A senior lecturer in philosophy at Newcastle University, she was known for her work on science, ethics and animal rights. She wrote her first book, Beast and Man , when she was in her late fifties, and went on to write over 15 more, including Animals and Why They Matter , Wickedness , The Ethical Primate , Evolution as a Religion , and Science as Salvation . She was awarded honorary doctorates by Durham and Newcastle universities. Her autobiography, The Owl of Minerva, was published in 2005. - #23
Frances Kamm
Frances Myrna Kamm is an American philosopher specializing in normative and applied ethics. Kamm is currently the Henry Rutgers University Professor of Philosophy and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. She is also the Littauer Professor of Philosophy and Public Policy Emerita at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, as well as Professor Emerita in the Department of Philosophy at New York University. - #24
Seyla Benhabib
1950 - Present (74 years)Seyla Benhabib is a Turkish-born American philosopher. Benhabib is a senior research scholar and adjunct professor of law at Columbia Law School. She is also an affiliate faculty member in the Columbia University Department of Philosophy and a senior fellow at the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. She was a scholar in residence at the Law School from 2018 to 2019 and was also the James S. Carpentier Visiting Professor of Law in spring 2019. She was the Eugene Mayer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale University from 2001 to 2020. She was director of the prog... - #25
Janet Radcliffe Richards
1944 - Present (80 years)Janet Radcliffe Richards is a British philosopher specialising in bioethics and feminism and Professor of Practical Philosophy at the University of Oxford. She is the author of The Sceptical Feminist , Philosophical Problems of Equality , Human Nature after Darwin , and The Ethics of Transplants .
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Top row, left to right: Patricia Hill Collins, Emmanuelle Charpentier, Malala Yousafzai, Shafi Goldwasser, Jennifer Doudna, Fabiola Gianotti, Michiko Kakutani, Lauren Underwood.
Bottom row, left to right: Fei-Fei Li, Esther Duflo, Kathy Reichs, Nancy Fraser, Brené Brown, Judith Curry, Jill Lepore, Zaha Hadid.
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